Senior Cloud Engineer

Akur8 is a young, dynamic, fast growing Insurtech startup that is revolutionizing insurance pricing with transparent AI. Since 2016 our skilled R&D team of Data Scientists, Software Engineers and Actuaries has developed unique AI algorithms that automate the insurance pricing process in an unprecedented way.

Our solution is a SaaS platform which allows insurance companies to model their risks 10 times faster, with a higher predictive power than traditional methods. constituting a major game changer for the insurance industry.

Akur8 has been already been selected:

• In CB Insights Top 50 World Insurtech Companies 2023
• In Insurtech Global’s Top 100 AIFinTech list 2023
• In Fintech Global’s Top 100 AIFinTech list 2023
• As No.24 in Sønr’s World Top 100 Insurtech Companies 2022
• As 3rd best overall (worldwide) in the CodinGame 2022 Software Engineering Fall Challenge

With 31 nationalities within our team, and offices in Paris, London, New York, Tokyo, Milan & Cologne, Akur8’s solution is international by design. Servicing 130 clients across 4 continents and targeting all non-life insurance carriers, we focus on more mature markets for faster expansion.

To learn more about Akur8, and what we do, click here.

Akur8 is, in all senses of the term, an equal opportunities employer. Akur8 puts diversity and inclusion at the heart of its values. We examine all applications based on equal skills and applying the principles of non-discrimination.

Akur8 continues to expand rapidly and is at a key moment in its history and evolution, as we move from a single product structure to multiple products. Our CloudOps teams must evolve to keep pace with this change and provide the best possible platform by ensuring technical excellence through seamless deployments, resilience, scalability and cost effectiveness. This is even more true now that we're starting to use Azure in addition to AWS, our historical hosting provider.

That's why we're looking for a Senior Cloud Engineer to help manage the growth of our international cloud operations (deploying, maintaining, and monitoring hundreds of cloud environments across multiple time zones) and help the team grow its Azure skills and achieve the same level of excellence as AWS. You will also be the first team member to work on time zones in North America.

Decisions within the Cloud Operations team are made as a group, so good communication skills, the ability to understand other stakeholders' points of view, and the ability to compromise to find the optimal solution are also important.

As an operational Senior Cloud Engineer, your typical set of missions shall be:

• Maintain and improve our infrastructure as code repositories (Terraform & ARM) to ensure Akur8's cloud remains reliable and resilient
• Contributing to the expansion of Akur8's cloud whilst maintaining our SLOs
• Increase automation and pipeline orchestration to remove toil
• Mentoring and teaching DevOps best practices throughout our organization
• Mentoring the team for Azure skills upgrading
• Contributing architecture designs for our platform, in collaboration with our development and product team, to improve performance, reliability, cost-effectiveness and support new feature of our products
• Help us continuously improve on monitoring and observability (mainly via Datadog)

• Contributing to our CI pipelines (GitHub Actions) ensuring best practices are always applied when dealing with containers (Docker)
• Working closely with our Security team to securing our cloud, by maintaining IT security standards & best practices, participating in building infrastructure scans
• Contributing towards open-source projects where appropriate
• Actively participate in on-call rotation (1 week per 4-6 weeks)

DevOps / Cloud Engineering stack : AWS, Terraform, Datadog, Github Actions, Auth0, Python, Ansible, Docker, Azure, AKS

We look for innovative and rigorous minds that are capable of helping our platform grow, so don't hesitate to apply if you possess:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field (or equivalent experience).
• A minimum of 5 years professional experience of monitoring and maintenance production systems throughout the entire SDLC
• At least 2 years recent working experience with Azure, ARM template or Terraform
• Recent experience deploying, monitoring, tuning and maintaining Kubernetes.
• Demonstrable experience configuring and maintaining Azure cloud environments.
• Strong experience with GitHub, workflows and actions
• Familiarity with the concepts of IT Security ‘best practice’ (i.e. Network Security, Firewalls & Flows Encryption, Secrets Management, Security Patch Management, Cloud identity & Access Management, etc.)
• An enthusiasm to collaborate with other internal stakeholders (Software Engineering, IT Security, IT Operations).
• A willingness to be ‘hands-on’ / operational whilst at the simultaneously evangelising on DevOps best practice
• The curiosity / ability to challenge the status-quo, while being pragmatic.
• The ability to work autonomously and the flexibility to embrace change
• Strong oral and written communication skills
• Fluent English language skills (spoken & written), French is a plus

Bonus skills:

• Programming capabilities with C# and .NET
• Experience with additional programming languages such as Python or Bash
• Strong experience with SQL datastores and their optimization
• Experience with AWS